M. De Charlus

 Marcel Proust 

Jellyfish! Orchid! When I was following only my own instinct, the jelly. fish repelled me at Balbec; but had I known how to look at it, like Michelet, from the point of view of natural history and of aesthetics, | would have seen a delectable girandole of azure. Are they not, with the transparent velvet of their petals, like the mauve orchids of the sea? Like So many creatures of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, like the plant that would produce vanilla but which, because in it the male organ is divided by a septum from the female organ, remains sterile unless hum. mingbirds or certain small bees transport the pollen from one to the other, or unless man fertilizes them artificially, M. de Charlus (and here the word “fertilization” must be taken in its moral sense, since in the physical sense the union of male with male is sterile, but it matters that an individual should be able to meet with the one pleasure he ts capable of enjoying, and that “here below every soul” can give someone “its music, its flame, or its fragrance”),26 M. de Charlus was one of those men who may be called exceptional because, however numerous they may be, the satisfaction, so simple with others, of their sexual needs depends on the coincidence of too many conditions, too difficult to encounter. For men like M. de Charlus (allowance being made for the accommodations that will gradually appear, and of which a hint may already have been given, demanded by the need for pleasure that resigns itself to a half-consent), a mutual love adds to the very great, at times insurmountable, difficulties it encounters among the common run of individuals, ones of its own so particular that what is always very rare for anyone at all becomes in their case almost impossible, and, should a truly happy encounter transpire, or one that nature makes to seem s0, their happiness, far more even than that of the normal lover, has something extraordinary, something selective, something profoundly necessary about it. The hatred of the Montagues and the Capulets?’ was as nothing compared with the impediments of every kind that have been overcome, the special eliminations to which nature must have subjected the already far-from-common chances that lead on to love, before a former maker of waistcoats, who had been anticipating setting off quietly for his office, should reel about, bedazzled, in front of a fifty-year-old man with a potbelly. This Romeo and this Juliet have good cause to believe that their love is not a momentary whim but truly predestined, prepared tor by the harmonies of their temperament, and not only by their own temperament but by that of their forebears, of their most remote heredity, so that the {ellow creature now conjoined to them belongs to them from before birth, has attracted them by a force comparable to that which governs the worlds in which we have spent our previous lives. M. de Charlus had distracted me from Jooking to see whether the bumblebee had brought the orchid the pollen it had been awaiting for so long, and that it had the good fortune to receive only thanks to a chance so improbable it might be called a sort of miracle. But it was a miracle also which I had just witnessed, of almost the same kind, and no less marvelous. As soon as I had considered the encounter from this point of view, everything about it seemed imbued with beauty. The most extraordinary stratagems that nature has invented to force insects to ensure the fertilization of flowers that could otherwise not be fertilized, for the male flower is too far removed from the female flower, or that which, if it is the wind that must ensure the transporting of the pollen, makes it much easier to detach from the male flower and much simpler for the female flower to trap it as it passes, by suppressing the secretion of the nectar, which is no longer of use since there are no insects to attract, and even the brilliance of the corollas that attract them, and the stratagem which, so that the flower may be reserved for the pollen it requires, which can fructify in it alone, causes it to secrete a liquid that immunizes it against other pollens—this seemed to me no more marvelous than the existence of the subvariety of inverts destined to ensure the pleasures of love to the invert who is growing old: of the men who are attracted, not by all men, but-through a phenomenon of correspondence and of harmony comparable to those that govem the fertilization of such heterostyled, trimorphic flowers as Lythrum salicaria—only by men much older than themselves. Jupien had just offered me an example of this subvariety, though one less striking than others that any human herborist, any moral botanist, will be able to observe, despite their rarity, and one that will present them with a frail young man awaiting the advances of a robust, potbellied fifty-year-old and remaining indifferent to the advances of other young men, just as the short-styled hermaphroditic flowers of Primula verts remain sterile for as long as they are being fertilized only by other, likewise short. styled Primula veris, whereas they welcome with delight the pollen from the long-styled Primula veris.22 Where M. de Charlus was concemed, however, I came to realize subsequently that for him there were various kinds of conjunction, certain of which, by their multiplicity, their barely perceptible instantaneity, and especially the absence of contact between the two agents, were even more reminiscent of those flowers which in a garden are fertilized by the pollen from a neighboring flower that they will never touch. There were indeed certain individuals that he found it enough to have come to him, and to hold them for a few hours under the sway of his tongue, to appease the desire kindled in him by some encounter. Merely with words the conjunction was made, as easily as may happen among the Infusoria. On occasions, as had no doubt transpired in my own case on the evening when I had been summoned by him after the Guermantes dinner party, assuagement came about thanks to a violent dressing down cast by the Baron into his visitor’s face, just as certain flowers, thanks to a spring mechanism, spray the unconsciously complicit, disconcerted insect from a distance. M. de Charlus had passed from being the dominated to the dominator, and, feeling himself calmed and purged of his anxiety, dismissed the visitor he had at once ceased to find desirable. Finally, inversion itself arising from the fact that the invert approximates too closely to a woman to be able to have useful relations with her, it is thereby linked to a higher law which means that so many hermaphroditic flowers remain infertilethat is, to the sterility of self-fertilization. It 1s true that inverts in search of a male are often content with an invert as effeminate as themselves. But it is enough that they should not belong to the female sex, of which they have inside them an embryo they are unable to make use of, as oc’ curs with so many hermaphroditic flowers and even certain hermaphro ditic animals, like the snail, which cannot be fertilized by themselves, but can be so by other hermaphrodites. Hence inverts, who readily link themselves to the ancient East or the golden age of Greece, might go further back still, to those experimental epochs when neither dioecious flowers nor unisexual animals existed, to that initial hermaphroditism of which a few rudimentary male organs in the female anatomy and female organs in the male anatomy appear to conserve the trace.?9 | found the mimicry of Jupien and M. de Charlus, incomprehensible to me at the outset, as curious as those gestures of enticement addressed to insects, according to Darwin, by the flowers known as composites, which raise the florets of their capitula so as to be seen from farther away, like a certain heterostyled flower that turns its stamens over and arches them in order to clear a path for insects, or which offers them an ablution, or, quite simply, like the fragrance of the nectar, the brilliance of its corollas, which were at that very moment attracting insects into the courtyard. From that day forward, M. de Charlus was to alter the time of his visits to Mme de Villeparisis, not that he would have been unable to meet Jupien elsewhere, and more conveniently, but, just as they were for me, the afternoon sunlight and the flowering shrub were no doubt linked to his memory. He did not content himself, moreover, with recommending the Jupiens to Mme de Villeparisis, to the Duchesse de Guermantes, and to a whole brilliant clientele who were all the more attentive to the young embroideress inasmuch as the few ladies who had resisted or merely taken their time were the object of terrible reprisals on the part of the Baron, either so that they might serve as an example, or because they had excited his fury and stood up against his efforts at domination. He made Jupien’s position more and more lucrative until finally he took him on as a secretary and set him up in the conditions in which we shall meet him later on. 

....

Faced by this initial revelation, I had greatly exaggerated the elective nature of so selective a conjunction. True, each of the men of M. de Charlus’s kind is an extraordinary creature, since, if he makes no con. cessions to life’s possibilities, he searches essentially for the love of g man of the other race, that is of a man who loves women (and who ip consequence will not be able to love him); contrary to what I believed in the courtyard, where I had just seen Jupien circling around M. de Chartus like the orchid making advances to the bumblebee, these ex. ceptional beings for whom we feel pity are legion, as we shall see in the course of the present work, for a reason that will be disclosed only at the end, and they complain themselves of being too many rather than too few. For the two angels who were posted at the gates of Sodom to learn whether its inhabitants, says Genesis, had done every one of the things report of which had risen as far as the Eternal had been, and we can but rejoice at the fact, very ill chosen by the Lord God, who ought to have entrusted the task only to a Sodomist. He would not have been led benevolently to lower the flaming sword or temper the sanctions by the excuses, “Father of six children, I have two mistresses, etc.” He would have answered: “Yes, and your wife suffers the torments of jealousy. But even if these women were not chosen by you in Gomorrah, you spend your nights with a keeper of flocks from Hebron.” And he would immediately have made him retrace his steps toward the town about to be destroyed by the rain of fire and brimstone. On the contrary, all the shameful Sodomists were allowed to flee, even if, on catching sight of a young boy, they looked away, like Lot’s wife, without thereby being turned as she was into pillars of salt.3° With the result that they had a numerous posterity, among whom this gesture has re mained habitual, like that of those debauched women who, while appearing to stare at a display of shoes in a shopwindow, look around at a student. These descendants of the Sodomists, so numerous that another verse of Genesis may be applied to them—“So that if a man be able to number the dust of the earth, so thy seed also shall be numbered”! have established themselves over the whole earth; they have had access to all the professions and gain admission so readily to the most exclusive clubs that, when a sodomist is not admitted, the black balls are in the majonty those of the sodomists, who take care to incriminate sodomy, having inherited the lie that enabled their ancestors to leave the accursed city. It is possible that they will return there one day. Certainly, they form in every country a colony at once Oriental, cultivated, musical, and slanderous, which has charming virtues and unbearable defects. A more thorough picture of them will emerge in the course of the ensuing pages, but I have wanted provisionally to forestall the fatal error that would consist, just as a Zionist movement has been encouraged, in creating a sodomist movement and in rebuilding Sodom. But, no sooner arrived there, and the sodomists would be leaving the town so as to appear not to belong to it, would take a wife, would keep mistresses in other cities, where they would find, moreover, all the appropriate amusements. They would go to Sodom only on days of supreme necessity, when their own town would be empty, at those times when hunger brings the wolf out from the woods; that is to say that everything would proceed in sum as in London, Berlin, Rome, Petrograd, or Paris, 

At all events, on that particular day, before my visit to the Duchesse, I was not thinking so far ahead and was distressed at having, by attending to the Jupien-Charlus conjunction, perhaps missed the fertilization of the flower by the bumblebee. 

And

 M. de Charlus was in sum only a Guermantes. But it was enough that nature should have thrown his nervous system out of balance sufficiently for him to prefer, instead of a woman, as his brother the Duc would have done, one of Virgil’s shepherds or Plato’s pupils, and qualities foreign to the Duc de Guermantes but often linked with this imbalance had turned M. de Charlus into a delightful pianist, an amateur painter who did not lack taste, and an eloquent talker. Who could have divined that the quick, anxious, charming style in which M. de Charlus had played the Schumannesque passage from Fauré’s sonata had its correlation in—I do not dare say, was caused by—the purely physical elements of M. de Charlus, in the defectiveness of his nerves? We shall explain the term “defectiveness of his nerves” later on, and the reasons why a Greek from the time of Socrates, and a Roman from the time of Augustus, could be what we know they were while remaining absolutely normal men, and not men-women such as we see today. In addition to a real aptitude for the arts, never brought to fruition, M. de Charlus had, far more than the Duc, loved their mother, and loved his wife, and even years later, when people spoke of them, tears would come, but superficial tears, like the perspiration of an over. weight man, whose brow is beaded with sweat at the least exertion, With the difference that to the latter people say, “You’re overheated!” whereas they pretend not to notice other people’s tears. They, that is to say, society; for the common people are concerned by seeing someone cry, as if a sob were more serious than a hemorrhage. His sadness following the death of his wife did not, thanks to his habit of lying, debar M. de Charlus from a way of life that was out of keeping. Later on, he stooped so low as to let it be understood that, during the funeral ceremony, he had found a means of asking the altar boy for his name and address. And this may have been true.